Mus003 | How Do You Know When a Drawing Is Done?
How do you know when a piece is finished? A lot has been said on this question already and by artists far more skillful than myself. The most common answer I hear from professionals is “when you know you cannot add another brush stroke that will make the piece better, you know you are done.” This always stuck me as throw away advice. If I knew that then I wouldn’t need the question in the first place. It’s a truism. If I am trying to make the best piece I can, then obviously it is finished when the marginal stroke makes it worse. Duh. The hard part is knowing when that point actually is.
With many forms of painting and drawing this can be sound advice, because you can just test out the next stroke. If it is worse then you remove it. This is most true of digital art (simply hit ctrl+z), but for more refined, tight or deeply rendered pieces a mark can often be removed without too much effort as well. In these mediums the cost of adding the next stroke is low. However this is not true of ink drawings, or loose works that have more life to them. Here the cost of the marginal stroke is not having to reverse it, because that is often not possible, the cost is having a more overworked, less fluid aesthetic, or to have inked a line that should not be. The cost is much higher. So knowing when you cannot add another marginal stroke to improve your piece is the important question. But it is effectively just the same question as what people are asking when they say “how do you know when a piece is finished?”
I will offer an equally useless piece of advice, albeit less of a truism. How do you know when a piece is finished? Experience. This is useless only in the moment of creation though. It might not help to know when this piece you are currently working on is done, but it will give you confidence that if you keep on returning to the page then eventually you will start answering this question for yourself.
The only way to know when you cannot add another stroke to improve your piece, is to have added enough strokes in the past that you have ruined a sufficient amount of artwork. From those experiences you start to build up an intuition for when to stop. Knowing when is a feeling, it is a sense that can be developed. It is not a mathematical equation and does not have a logical process to answering. At least not when you create in the realm of irreversible strokes.
Ultimately, you are always trying to walk the edge between finished and unfinished, trying to find that point right at the peak of your current capabilities. This edge is invisible to those who have never crossed it, and unexplainable to those who have never tried. The edge between finished and unfinished is best described by Hunter S. Thompson when he is writing on his own edge in life.
“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”
The only way to know the edge is to have gone beyond it. Time and time again until you have built up an intuition for where it might be. To push pieces until you ruin them over and over again. Only then can you put down the pen and know when that marginal stroke is not worth taking.